GTD: The Secret of Having a Workflow
I had a nice talk with Amir Amirani today who had some real trouble with Getting Things Done (GTD). As a documentary maker he had a real problem with keeping tack of his contacts, organizing his bills, and simply being productive. In our digital age this is more and more becoming a problem, and the most popular solution (setting aside all the very difficult high-tech solutions) is GTD by David Allen. Amir recently bought Allen’s book and I noticed that his book has much similarity with my obsession with Workflows.
The five basic steps of GTD are Collect, Process, Organize, Review and Do, which basically make up the framework for any decent workflow. I personally have quite some workflows in my live, and recently I actually started recognizing and promoting them to others. I really like my snail-mail-workflow (which I actually stole from Reinier) in which I collect the mail, scan them to my pc, organize them by sender, keep the hardcopies that I think I need, and then stash the rest in a box. I have many other workflows for things like blogging, video-podcasting, and life in general and I wonder if other people also have these extensive workflows.
One problem with GTD that I noticed is that although Amir bought the book, he hadn’t read it yet and hadn’t gotten to Getting Things Done. My personal workflow motivated him to get started, and it made me realize that having a workflow is more important than being efficient in the first place. Once you have a workflow, you are doing stuff, analyzing what the problems are, and applying GTD tips like the Hipster PDA. In the end a problem of GTD is that you need to Get The Book Done before you know how to get things done.
PS: Post your own workflow as a comment if you think it makes you getting things done.
